PENGUIN BOOKS
CHILD OF ALL NATIONS
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born on the island of Java in 1925. He was imprisoned first by the Dutch from 1947 to 1949 for his role in the Indonesian revolution, then by the Indonesian government as a political prisoner. Many of his works have been written while in prison, including the Buru Quartet (This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass) which was conceived in stories the author told to other prisoners during his confinement on Buru Island from 1969 to 1979.
Pramoedya is the author of thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. He received the PEN Freedom-to-write Award in 1988 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1995. He is currently under city arrest in Jakarta where his books are banned and selling them a crime punishable by imprisonment.
Max Lane was second secretary in the Australian embassy in Jakarta until recalled in 1981 because of his translation of Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet.
CHILD
OF ALL
NATIONS
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Translated from the
Indonesian by Max Lane
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1984
First published in the United States of America by William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1993
Reprinted by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc.
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1996
23 25 27 31 30 28 26 24 22
Copyright © Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 1979
English translation copyright © Max Lane, 1991
All rights reserved
Originally published in Indonesian by Hasta Mitra Publishing House, Jakarta, 1980.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:
Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 1925–
[Anak semua bangsa. English]
Child of all nations/Pramoedya Ananta Toer; translated from the Indonesian by Max Lane.
p. cm.
Translation of: Anak semua bangsa.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61532-4
1. Indonesia—History—1798–1942—Fiction. I. Title.
PL5089.T8A25 1993
899’.22132—dc20 93–3516
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bembo
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
To preserve something of the rich texture of cultures, languages, forms of address, dialects, beliefs, and milieus of the Indies, I have retained numerous Malay, Javanese, and Dutch terms.
These are italicized the first time they appear. If explanations or translations are required, they can be found in the Glossary at the back of this book. The Glossary also contains some English words or acronyms and certain identifications that may not be familiar to the English-speaking reader. The explanations given have been kept to the minimum. A richly rewarding project that awaits scholars of Indonesian history is the preparation of a detailed guide to all the historical and cultural material contained in Pramoedya’s tetralogy.
The production of such a complex translation is not easy. The contributions made by Susanna Rodell and Jackie Yowell at Penguin Australia to the editing of this manuscript have been very important.
I am grateful to Professor A. H. Johns of the Australian National University for providing facilities, including an office, while I was working on this translation.
I would like to thank, once again, Anna Nurfia for her tolerance of the time taken up by this project. I must also thank those concerned in Indonesia for their continuing friendship, which has been a cable that has kept the energy of my commitment to Indonesia flowing here in Australia.
INTRODUCTION
“We fought back, Child, as well and as honorably as possible.”
These were the words that ended Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind, the first in a quartet of which Child of All Nations is the second. This Earth of Mankind was indeed a story of people fighting back, of resisting the worst of colonial oppression and greed.
It was also a gripping story of remarkable characters caught in the cultural whirlpool that was the Dutch East Indies of the 1890s. Because Pramoedya’s vision extends far beyond parochial politics to reach for more universal human concerns, it is a bitter irony that, in 1965, he was arrested by Suharto’s junta, and his entire library, including research and notes assembled over many years, were burned to ashes. He was jailed, without trial, for fourteen years. Denied access to writing materials, he kept his literary vision alive by recounting his stories to other prisoners. Only in 1975 was he permitted the facilities to commit his novels from memory to paper.
A year after his release from Buru Island concentration camp in 1979, This Earth of Mankind was published in Jakarta as Bumi Manusia. Soon after, its sequel Anak Semua Bangsa (Child of All Nations) was published. Both novels became best-sellers in Indonesia, as reviewers hailed Pramoedya’s return to the nation’s literary life. However, in May 1981 both books were banned in Indonesia. The government accused the books of surreptitiously spreading “Marxism-Leninism”—surreptitious because, they claimed, the author’s great literary dexterity made it impossible to identify actual examples of this “Marxism-Leninism.” Later in the year students from the University of Indonesia were arrested and expelled when they invited Pramoedya to speak on campus. One of the publishers of Pramoedya’s books, Yusuf Isak, was imprisoned for over three months, without being charged. Pramoedya himself and Hasyim Rahmam, Yusuf’s partner in the publishing house Hasta Mitra, were repeatedly interrogated.
In This Earth of Mankind Minke is an eighteen-year-old Javanese, the first to be educated in an exclusive Dutch school in Surabaya. Striving for his own personal and intellectual development, he is drawn into the more immediate and dramatic struggle that faces his formidable native mentor, and then mother-in-law, Nyai Ontosoroh. Sold as a girl to a wealthy Dutch businessman by her ambitious father, Nyai had become acquainted with the true character of the colonial system early in life, and fought back at it with vengeance. After her corrupt and insane Dutch master is murdered, she rises to restore and control his business, Boerderij Buitenzorg. Minke, on the other hand, has been spoiled by the system. He has received an elite Dutch education. He is attracted to Dutch ways by the apparent superiority of the West, such as the modern achievements of el
ectricity, machines, photographs, and books.
Minke’s struggle, sparked off by his association with Nyai, becomes essentially against himself—against his integration into, and identification with, the colonialists’ civilization. Nyai Ontosoroh is self-taught; she has never been to an elite Dutch school, nor any school, except that of life itself. Yet she proves herself again and again to be capable of both defending her principles and self-respect, and imparting to Minke knowledge and understanding that he would never learn at school. Nyai Ontosoroh’s dignity is evidence of an alternative and superior civilization developed in spite of rather than because of Dutch colonial authority.
The separate struggles—Minke’s against his illusions about Western values, and Nyai’s against their brutalizing effects—are complicated and intensified by their coming together. They are brought together by Nyai’s Eurasian daughter, Annelies, whom Minke loves and marries. Minke moves into Nyai’s mansion to live with Annelies. Annelies’s deep and unqualified love for Minke is an attempt to resolve her own complex contradictions. Annelies is not legally Nyai’s daughter and, after Annelies’s Dutch father dies, she “reverts” to being the property of his far-off Dutch relatives. Nyai and Minke’s personal struggles are put aside as they fight (unsuccessfully) to protect Annelies from being taken to the Netherlands.
Minke’s eyes are opened by these experiences. He is amazed by the cold, legalistic language of the court. In the colonialists’ eyes, Natives are just items on inventories. Minke and Nyai become one force as they rally all their energies and friends to resist the plans of the dead Dutchman’s relatives. Minke’s outstanding talents as a writer are tested to the full: His passionate challenges to the inhumanity of colonial “justice” are circulated far and wide.
The use of language in this period was an important indicator of a person’s social caste. Dutch, of course, was the language of the governing caste; Javanese, the Native language of the Javanese; and Madurese, the Native language of Madura (an island off Java). Malay was the language of interracial, or rather intercaste communication (as many elite Javanese could speak Dutch), as well as the language of many Eurasians. Indeed, in situations where the caste order needed to be emphasized, Natives were forbidden to use Dutch. Not only did colonialism install Dutch as the supreme caste language of Java, it helped reinforce and even exaggerate caste distinctions in the Native languages themselves, especially Javanese. The Javanese language already operated on at least three different levels, each used according to the person to whom one was speaking. This feudal stratification was given extra force as Javanese feudal notables, devoid of real political power in the face of the Dutch cannon and Dutch capital, channelled their oppressive energies into culture, something Dutch cannon and capital were, in turn, frequently ready to buttress. The egalitarian and colloquial Javanese that was used in the palaces and royal houses of Java actually died out in this period. Only the masses of peasants and other toilers retained such an egalitarian Javanese.
The terms Native, Mixed-Blood and Pure are capitalized. This is because they do not simply identify the racial origin of the persons involved, but manifest how, even in everyday life, racial caste dominated all of Netherlands Indies society. These categories were eventually given legal status. Thus racism was institutionalized as a caste system by colonialism.
Among the many complex interrelated themes of political, cultural, and social life in the Indies, Pramoedya describes the emergence of a bourgeois from a feudal culture; the demands for rights of indigenous language and culture; the divisions amongst the colonialists over their treatment of the Natives; the intervention of Dutch colonial capitalism into the Javanese countryside; and the humiliation of the Javanese nobility in their dependence on Dutch officialdom. Most importantly, he writes of the development of those energies that would galvanize the Indonesian people into finally standing up and throwing off the yoke of colonial domination.
These themes are brought to life by the richly drawn characters in This Earth of Mankind, many of whom reappear in Child of All Nations: Nyai, Minke, and Annelies; Ah Tjong, the corrupt Chinese brothel owner who murders Herman Mellema, Nyai’s Dutch master; Robert Mellema, his and Nyai’s son, who imitates his father’s Pure-blood Dutchness and hates Natives; Robert Suurhof, Minke’s Dutch rival from school; Magda Peters, the liberal Dutch teacher expelled from the Indies; Jean Marais, the one-legged Frenchman, painter, and veteran of the colonial war in Aceh; Mr. de la Croix, the liberal but interfering Dutch district officer, and his two socially conscious daughters, Miriam and Sarah; Maiko, the Japanese prostitute used by both father and son Mellema; Robert Jan Dapperste (alias Panji Darman), the Native boy adopted by a Dutch preacher; Maarten Nijman, the editor of the powerful Dutch newspaper published in the Indies, the Soerabaiaasch Nieuws; Kommer, the exuberant Eurasian editor of a popular Malay-language newspaper; Dr. Martinet, a representative of Dutch science and education at its best; Darsam, the tough fighter and right-hand man of Nyai; Mr. D——. L——., the cowed Dutch accountant; the mysterious Fatso, shadowing Minke everywhere; Minke’s authoritarian, aristocratic father and his gentle, Javanese-educated mother; as well as a host of minor characters.
While This Earth of Mankind saw the losing battle to defend Annelies brought to a climax, the struggles of Nyai and Minke continue in Child of All Nations. The fate of Nyai’s “first child,” the business, is not resolved. But more fundamental is the fate of Minke. With Annelies seemingly lost, how will he deal with the lessons he learned in the course of that battle? His environment has been completely changed; no longer is it limited to his school, his old boarding house, Nyai’s home, and the gallery of Jean Marais, with whom he is a partner in a furniture business. Minke has been drawn into the vortex of colonial society and must now confront all its harsh implications.
In Child of All Nations, Minke has become part of the vanguard that would change the face of the East Indies. Like iron on the anvil, he is beaten into shape by the forces of change operating in the early twentieth century. It is not only a time of change for the Indies: China is awakening—a phenomenon Minke has to face personally; Japan is aroused and will soon defeat Russia in war; the Filipino people have created, even if only briefly, the first Asian republic. At home he is confronted by things he had never dreamed of. Most importantly, he becomes involved with representatives of his own people: the peasants. There are certainly new lessons to learn and greater challenges to come in Child of All Nations.
—Max Lane
Table of Contents
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Glossary
1
Annelies had set sail. Her going was as a young branch wrenched apart from the plant that nourished it. This parting was a turning point in my life. My youth was over, a youth beautifully full of hopes and dreams. It would never return.
The sun was moving slowly, crawling like a snail, inch by inch across the heavens. Slowly, slowly—not caring whether the distance it had traversed would ever be traversed again.
The clouds hung thinly across the sky, unwilling to release even a single spray of drizzle. The atmosphere was gray, as though the world had lost its multitude of colors.
The old people teach us through their legends that there is a mighty god called Batara Kala. They say it is he who makes all things move further and further from their starting point, inexorably, towards some unknown final destination. A human blind to the future, I could do no more than hope to know. We never even really understand what we have already lived through.
People say that before humankind stands only distance. And its limit is the horizon. As the distance is crossed, the horizon moves away. There is no romance so strong th
at it could tame and hold them—the eternal distance and the horizon.
Batara Kala had pushed Annelies across many distances and had pushed me across others. The further apart we were forced, the clearer it became that no one could tell what the future held. The distance opening out before me made me understand she was not just a fragile doll. A woman who can love so deeply is not a doll. Perhaps, also, she was the only woman whose love for me was pure. And the further Batara Kala pulled us apart, the more I came to feel that truly, I loved her.
And love, like every other object and situation, has its shadow. And love’s shadow is called pain. There is nothing without its shadow except light itself.
Whether light or shadow, nothing can escape being pushed along by Batara Kala. No one can return to his starting point. Maybe this mighty god is the one whom the Dutch call the Teeth of Time. He makes the sharp blunt, and the blunt sharp; the small are made big and the big made small. All are pushed on towards that horizon, while it recedes eternally beyond our reach, pushed on towards annihilation. And it is that annihilation that in turn brings rebirth.
I don’t really know whether this beginning to my notes is fitting or not. At the very least everything must have a beginning. And this is the beginning I have written.
Mama and I hadn’t been allowed out of the house for three days nor permitted to receive guests.
A district police head rode up on his horse. I didn’t leave my room. It was Mama who met him, and hardly a moment passed before the shouting started in Malay. Mama called me out of my room. The two of them stood facing each other.
She pointed to a piece of paper on the table: “Minke, the police chief here says we were never under arrest. Yet we haven’t been able to leave the house for over a week now.”
“Yes,” the policeman explained, “you now are being officially notified: The two inhabitants of this house are free to come and go.”